bitter reply struck me as subtle and smart.
I was in my late twenties when it first happened in life, not in literature. After an evening of too much food and wine, I became sad and slack in the sack. At that age, however, recovery from excess comes quickly, and as soon as I could, I did. With the passing years, this happened more often and recovery came less quickly, so I was careful with drink, sexuality being a man’s natural guide to temperance.
I thought the day would come when sex would be over, but that seemed such a distant prospect that no crow’s nest I could climb would allow a sighting. I read that in some retirement communities, men were so outnumbered by women that they devoted themselves to the pleasures of their slacker years: getting laid and getting high. At sixty I had no thought of retirement, but when I did, the prospect of spliffs and eager ladies didn’t seem shabby at all.
But the body does say no eventually. In her late years, M.F.K. Fisher gave an interview to the New York Times in which she revealed that a few years before she had lost interest in sex and that recently she no longer cared for food. For the famously sensual gastronome to admit this only meant one thing, I concluded: The end was near. Sure enough, next time I read about her was in an obituary.
Passions for sex and food. Their passing from my life would be harbingers of death, but as Don Juan says in his first appearance on the stage in seventeenth-century Spain, ¡Cuán largo me lo fiais!—what a long time you give me to pay it (my sinning) back. Eat, drink and be merry for Death is far, far away.
Impotence? Yes, libido was declining, but that had its merits. Best of all, age could make a man a good lover. The embarrassment of premature ejaculation was a distant memory. On the contrary, as long as erections held, an older man could be a paragon of virility, allowing a woman multiple orgasms until she tired. Of course, once a man is done, the call of “Again!” cannot be answered right away. Time for pillow talk, dinner, sleep. We rest to engage another day.
But my idyll had ended.
●
Moment
The first time I touched a girl’s bare breast I came in my pants. My bathing suit, really—we were at the beach. I went in the surf and that washed the semen away. And I was not ashamed or even slightly troubled because, well, I was quite drunk. It was a beach party at the end of my first year in college. I was seventeen and still a virgin. But I had a girlfriend. We had passionate kissing sessions, but no touching of breasts or genitals. Not because she stopped me when I tried, but because I didn’t try. Self-consciousness of my inexperience trumped the horniness of a teenage boy. After that night our kissing sessions included baring our chests. I touched, fondled, kissed, suckled her small breasts. But that’s as far as we went. Or rather, as far as I went. She grew tired of me and, in the middle of that summer, she dumped me and took up with an older guy who, I’m sure, screwed her properly. My heart was broken and my desire pounded vainly inside me. It would take what seemed like an eternity, actually about a year, for my heart to heal and sex to be given to me like a precious gift. Still, almost half a century later I remember clearly, in spite of the haze of alcohol, that moment my hand felt her nipple.
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Digital
A finger up your ass. There is no other way to describe what is, for many men, a troublesome passage.
Sodomy is common among both gay and straight men. For the latter it becomes a prize, like fellatio. In truth, nothing feels more satisfying, at least to this man, than vaginal intercourse in the much-maligned missionary position. Nothing is more complete, more penetrating. Emptying oneself in climax feels total that way. But other orifices beckon. And anal sex is like a treat. Something special.
To give. To receive is another matter. To be penetrated by your partner’s finger at the point of orgasm is part of the heterosexual repertoire, enjoyed by many men, and, like sodomizing a woman, a special treat, the anus holding a privileged position in the body of desire. Still, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Many men are phobic about being penetrated. Perhaps we associate it with our homosexual fears, the haunting suspicion that, oh no, we might be queer. But even that fear seems contrived and self-conscious. Phobias are primal. We’re either freaked or not. I am.
No rise in sexual heat has ever led me to want a lover’s finger, no matter how tenderly or lewdly inserted. And that phobia is even stronger in the doctor’s office, where sexual heat has never appeared, even in the presence of attractive females.
The digital exam, a finger inserted in the rectum to feel the prostate and detect possible enlargement or tumors, is the subject of jokes. But to many men it’s so far from a laughing matter that they avoid the procedure. And here, at the point of denial, begins the intersection of sexuality and cancer.
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Palabra
At the time of my seventh hormone injection, my oncologist told me we’d stop after a year and monitor my PSA and testosterone levels. A rise would mean the cancer was growing again and it would be time to restart the shots. What if my testosterone rises but the PSA doesn’t? I asked, eager to return to my libidinous self, or, rather, eager for my libidinous self, person who had left seven months before, to re-inhabit my body and consciousness.
If testosterone rises, that means cancer is back, the doctor said, even if PSA is not way up. I was crestfallen as I did some quick calculations. Will I ever have a sex life again? I asked.
Physicians are not given to terminal answers. I like that about them, for I believe there are no absolute truths—I am agnostic by nature and my years as an academic exposed me to the slippery nature of “truth.” So I wasn’t surprised when he answered ambiguously. Maybe yes, maybe not, nothing is sure. But the look on his face led me to believe the answer was what I feared.
No.
I had entered this treatment with the thought that I’d be a sexual being again.
Erection! I’d already had a dream in which I was erect and was shouting at the top of my lungs, “I have a hard-on!, I have a hard-on!” Except that it was in my first language, Spanish. ¡Se me paró la pinga!
Alas, there was no tumescence when I awoke.
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Girl Crazy
I don’t remember a time when I did not desire something sexual and female, many years before I knew what sexual things I could do with a girl. This powerful desire ran counter to other aspects of my temperament, which were, and are, for lack of a better word, gay.
I sucked at sports. I slinked away from fights. I did not have a hard body. I loved fashion and books; later I loved art and music. At my all-boys school there were effeminate boys who were bullied heartlessly. This was the ’50s and a Latin culture. Machismo ruled. I feared I might be categorized with the effeminates, and, in fact, I have a vague recollection of a boy telling me I was almost, but not quite, one of them, something that would get repeated throughout my life, when, among mucho macho men, no one could tell whether I was gay or not.
In the end, I wound up telling myself that I was gay in every way but one, and that one was the way that determined whether one fell in one camp or the other: an obsessive desire for intimate contact with female flesh.
When I thought of naked girls, I had genital feelings way before puberty. Like other teen boys of my time, I eagerly sought the photos in skin magazines. When I finally had full sexual contact with female
